Last week, Mrs Nugent, Mrs Somerville & Mrs Corr went to Hafnarfjordur in Iceland to begin our new Erasmus Plus KA2 project - Full Steam Ahead. Our school is the project coordinator and this project should have begun last year but because of Covid 19 we got a 12 month extension. The partners in this project are from Iceland, Belgium, Croatia, Norway and England. Each month the teachers who are coordinating in each school have been meeting up online and last school year we ran an eTwinning project where the schools exchanged STEAM lesson ideas each month. We will run another eTwinning project this year. Our project logo was designed by the Croatian team.
Unfortunately the English team could not travel this time but the other 4 partners all made it to Reykjavik for the 4 day meeting of the project.
On the first day we all met up in the preschool and had a tour of the school and learned how they operate each day. The coordinators then had a meeting to set up monthly Zoom dates for each school and to discuss how the project will run this year and pick dates for the next mobility in Belgium in May. The other staff involved went to the woods with some of the classes to see how their children spend time when outdoors. The school are lucky to have a large wooded area within walking distance of the preschool.
On the second day we all arrived at the preschool at 8.00 and it was so dark - they don't get daylight until around 10.45 in Winter. But the preschool staff and children make the most of the dark and celebrate it, they had torches and lights set up around the playground, projectors on the walls and a fire lit to help keep warm and cook some popcorn. It was amazing to see how happy all the children were to be out in the dark and how the staff use this experience to play with light and shadows etc. It was truly magical in the snow too.
That evening we came back to the preschool at night to share presentations on each of the partner schools with all the staff from the Icelandic preschool.
On day 3 we arrived at the preschool at 10.00 so it was much brighter and each partner set up a 'station' in the playground where the children could come and explore an activity from each partner school. The Croatians were making bouncing bubbles, the Belgians had some homemade slime, the Norwegian had set up a small rope blindfold course for the children and we had brought an idea that Ronan from Activity NI had done with the nursery children - volcanoes versus craters. there was again a fire in the playground and pancakes were being cooked. It was a lot of fun to see the children enjoying lots of new ideas. In the afternoon the coordinators went to the woods with 3 of the classes & the others stayed to learn some more about the approach & ethos of the preschool.
On day 4 we all went on a cultural tour to see some of the more famous sights of the surrounding area - it is known as the Golden Circle tour. we went to Thingvellir National Park, the Gullfoss waterfall, the Geysir site and Selfoss. It was such an amazing experience in the show and to see such a powerful waterfall with lots of frozen parts was incredible. We also visited a tomato farm in a greenhouse for lunch, it was just incredible to see all the tomato plants growing in a warm space surrounded by snow.
The staff from Windmill had a wonderful time and have lots of new ideas to bring back to share with the children.
**Travelling during Covid times created different challenges, each person taking part agreed to self administer an antigen rapid test each morning so we knew we were ok to meet up face to face and spend time together each day. Everyone had to have a negative test administered by a professional to travel in the first place and both ourselves and the Norwegians had to have professional antigen tests to travel home.
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